Experience
- White House National Economic Council (Biden and Obama administrations)
- Federal Trade Commission
- New York Attorney General’s office
Expertise
- Competition and anti-trust
- Technology industry regulation
- First Amendment and free speech
Education
- Harvard Law School, J.D.
- McGill University, B.Sc.
Recent Coverage
FEB 9, 2026
The Majority Report with Sam Seder
Tim Wu on his new book the Age of Extraction and the danger of tech platforms.
FEB 8, 2026
ProMarket: America is Gambling its Future Away
Tim Wu’s recent Age of Extraction similarly argues that digital platforms leverage variable reward schedules in their design to provide the same dopamine hit for surprising outcomes as gambling. The chance that a social media algorithm sends a user’s post or video viral, however small, engages the user’s brain the same way a slot machine does.
FEB 6, 2026
NYT Ezra Klein Show: We Didn’t Ask for this Internet
Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu explain why the internet failed to live up to its early promise.
JAN 5, 2026
Bloomberg The Close: Columbia’s Tim Wu on Monopoly Concerns ‘Outside Tech’
Tim Wu, Columbia Law professor and former White House technology adviser, says policymakers need to ensure big tech does not extract too much from the economy. He tells Romaine Bostick and Katie Greifeld on “The Close” that it may be time to push back on big tech’s power.
MAY 23, 2024
HuffPost | The Case For Breaking Up Ticketmaster, ‘The Monopoly Of Our Time That Everybody Hates’
Tim Wu, former special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, was speaking to a gathering of antitrust hawks at the American Economic Liberties Project’s Anti-Monopoly Summit in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. When the discussion turned to Ticketmaster and Live Nation, Wu called it “the monopoly of our time that everybody hates.”
He argued that if any modern company should be targeted for antitrust enforcement, it should be Ticketmaster-Live Nation, and that pursuing such a case was a matter of following “popular will”:
If or when the Justice Department of the United States files suit against Ticketmaster-Live Nation, that will be a happy day for the republic. I just want to point out if you ask a person in the street, they may have whatever feelings about Google or Apple, but nobody, nobody likes the Ticketmaster monopoly. And I think there’s something to that. I think that we have to be showing we’re taking people’s concerns seriously. It’s just like sitting in front of everybody’s faces that Ticketmaster Live Nation is this untouched monopoly…
Going back in history again, Theodore Roosevelt started antitrust, and he was like, ‘We have to break up Standard Oil. Like, what is this? If this law was written for something, it was written for the Standard Oil monopoly.’ And in our times, if this movement means something, it’s going to be taking on Ticketmaster, which is the monopoly of our time that everybody hates. Now, I don’t want to prejudge the case, but I guess I just did. But I do think it’s important that popular will says something.
APR 29, 2024
New York Times | When It Comes to TikTok, the World’s Democracies Have Played the Sucker for Far Too Long
If the United States refuses to enforce the principles of internet freedom and openness, it makes a mockery of them. I will be the first to admit that even the United States has at times failed to respect these principles, particularly when it comes to state surveillance. But the answer is not to throw up our hands and declare that there is nothing to be done.
Interested in speaking with Tim Wu?
About Tim
Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate, and professor at Columbia Law School. Wu’s best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he also writes about private power, free speech, copyright, and antitrust. His books The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants have won wide recognition and awards.
Wu has worked in academia, federal and state governments. He worked at the White House for the National Economic Council; at the Federal Trade Commission, for the New York Attorney General’ as a fellow at Google, and for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry. He was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School.
Wu is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and was formerly a contributing writer at NewYorker.com and contributing editor at the New Republic. He has been named to the Politico 50 twice, to America’s 100 most influential lawyers, and also won awards from Scientific American magazine, National Law Journal, 02138 Magazine. He has twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing and in 2017 he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
